[Matsta]

Exactly. A53 cores are efficiency cores designed for non-intensive background tasks in phones to save battery.

The only decent cpu atm that will eventually show up in TV boxes is the Rockchip Rk3588, but they aren't as cheap as some old s905x chips, and software support is very early days, so it will be a while before we see them in any android tv boxes.

The key does seem to be you need at least a quad-core of high-efficiency cores. The Nvidia Tegra X1 found in the Nvidia Shield and Switch runs fine even though it has even older A57 cores(predecessor to the A72). Compare this to rockchip's last-gen Rk3399, which only has 2x A72 cores (and 4x A53 cores) and is pretty slow compared to a Rpi 4 (but that could also be because of crap software support on the Rockchip side)